Everyone Lives
by I'll get to it.eventually
Summary: "To travel back in time, to prevent so many losses and betrayals..." Who wouldn't want something like that? In fact, since Rivaille, Eren, and Hanji are the last three humans alive, that's all they have to hope for. They'll have to grab on to that hope with both hands in order to stay alive and stick together through the trials and loss they'll face, and maybe, just maybe...
1. Chapter 1

**Good morning, all! I tripped and fell into the SnK fandom, and now I can't seem to get out. Anyway, it's a crime that we don't have more fanfiction, so here is my offering to the SnK gods. I hope you like it!**

**TW: Canonical levels of blood, guts, and violence in some chapters. Character death. Hand-wavey science. Terrible medical practices-don't try this at home, kids. Mild language, some spoilers, made up spoilers for things that never happen in the manga. Hanji. I think that's it for warnings.**

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Rivaille heard the harsh breathing of his comrade from his position on the floor. She was-they all were-injured and exhausted after fighting and running for the last...the last something. A month, maybe, or two, or a lifetime. It could have been as short as a week. All Rivaille knew was that they were the last two humans left in the world, excluding Eren, who was nearly constantly in his titan form these days, drawing attention away from his companions. It was exhausting and Eren was going to die if he kept it up, but Rivaille knew he was in no condition to stop the titan. Rivaille wasn't in any condition to do much of anything, these days.

Not since some _bastard titan_ had cut off his leg.

Eren and Hanji had nearly had to abandon him when he couldn't run with them, before Eren had had the brilliant-but-terrifying idea of carrying Rivaille in his mouth. Never again would Rivaille underestimate the unpleasantness involved in that mode of transport.

But it didn't matter. Soon none of it would matter, if Hanji was right about this. To travel back in time, to prevent so many losses and betrayals...

At first, it had been an idle idea. They hadn't even though it was possible-Hanji wasn't that kind of scientist, after all; her area was more 'what even are titans' than 'how do we travel back in time to fix everything that's ever gone wrong.' It had been at the very beginning of the end when Eren had made some remark about remembering exactly how he would do things differently for 'next time.' As there was no 'next time' to speak of, Rivaille had asked him what he could possibly mean by that, and surprisingly enough, Eren had come out and told him the bizarre truth: ever since he could remember, Eren had thought about everything as if he was going to travel back in time and redo it later-it allowed him to live his life to the fullest, he'd said.

Rivaille thought that that kind of thinking would do exactly the opposite, but then again, Eren _was_ a little odd.

After that the two of them had always mentioned what they'd change if they _were_ able to do it all over again, everything from half-jokes to vows of revenge.

Not long after that, the last betrayal ever to befall humanity had happened. That was what they called it-the Final Betrayal. No one at all had seen it coming, and the majority of the soldiers had been killed in one single night by That Traitor. Even after that, they'd been stupid and hadn't realized who the culprit was, allowing a second massacre the next night...thankfully, Rivaille had managed to keep some of his brain cells, and he'd been with Eren when the teen had been attacked. Between the two of them, they'd managed to escape, though Eren took a truly ridiculous amount of damage in the process.

Or, considering who they were fighting, Rivaille had come out relatively unscathed.

Either way, the walls had fallen not long after that, especially since there were very few soldiers left to patrol them. The Scouting Legion had taken the least amount of casualties for once, but nearly everyone with real skills or experience had died in the first attack. It wasn't as if the newbies weren't talented, but there had been about twenty soldiers against what seemed to be every titan in existence. Before reinforcements could arrive, nearly everyone had died and Wall Rose had been lost.

While the fighting had been going on, Rivaille had sent four different people out to report the traitor to the central district, but all four had been caught and killed with their message undelivered. Since most of the military had been called into Trost temporarily by one of That Traitor's ploys, most of them were killed in the massacre, and That Traitor had managed to get into the city center undiscovered and kill all of the soldiers there, as well. Rivaille still couldn't believe that no one had questioned the need to have the entire army gathered in Trost, and even after communications had been lost, no one had suspected That Traitor.

After that, the entire army had consisted of the very few people who had escaped the massacres; which had been those who hadn't been called to Trost or the central district (a grand total of fifteen incompetents from outer districts), Eren, Hanji, and Rivaille himself. And That Traitor. It hadn't been a bright, optimistic picture.

In the central district, now the only place with a wall, there had been no living government officials, no room, no food, and no order. People had been killed in the street and eaten by other people just to put food in their mouths. Eren had been forced to flee the instant he'd set foot in the district, and even then, he'd barely escaped with his life. Rivaille had carved a path for the two of them to run away on with the last of his energy, and they'd run far from humans. Rivaille couldn't tell you to this day why he'd exiled himself to follow Eren-perhaps he'd seen where humanity was going, or perhaps he'd had some inkling of the companionship he'd find with the titan.

Either way, only the territory outside of Wall Maria had been safe from cannibalistic poachers, and that had been full of titans. They'd met Hanji there, forced into exile like they were for her obsession with titans. She'd taken the time-travel idea and run with it, insisting that she could make it happen. Rivaille had let her have her coping method, and that's all it had been-until she had woken them up during her watch and another her had appeared, this one half a minute older than the one that had woken them up. The body of the older one had flickered and disappeared-back to her own time, they'd figured out half a minute later-but she had managed time travel.

After that, they'd stopped moving around like they had been doing. They'd set up a hidden lab in a cave at the base of a mountain, and Eren and Rivaille had begun keeping titans away. Then Rivaille had lost his leg, and it was just Eren out there. All day. Every day. When he was clearly exhausted and his wounds weren't healing as fast as they should. Which was stupid.

Rivaille may have disapproved of that decision just a little. His instincts as a commanding officer had always screamed at him when he was sending a soldier to their doom, and more than that, he may or may not have gotten a bit attached to the last two companions he had left.

But now Hanji was certain that she could send them back to before Wall Maria had even fallen, which they'd deemed far enough back, and was trying to find a way to keep them there. She'd insisted that there was a way to transfer their memories to their younger counterparts; citing that Eren had been hit with a syringe of something that had made him lose his memories once, so therefore there had to be a way to restore a person's memories. In fact, the more research she did, the more she insisted that they'd be able to put their entire consciousnesses into their younger selves and leave their older bodies behind to fade back into the future. Eren and Rivaille didn't bother arguing with her, since she would simply break the fabric of reality to prove them wrong anyway.

Having a mostly-sane genius on your side was good, Rivaille reflected. A completely sane one wouldn't invent time travel.

All she needed, ironically, was a little bit of time. She even thought she'd have it ready today, whatever 'it' was, and they'd be able to simply walk out of this time and into the past. All Rivaille could see was scrap metal littered around the cave floor, collected mostly in one corner; a couple of syringes; and water bottles acting as test tubes. It had been a miracle that Hanji had managed to salvage that much equipment at all. She was messing with the liquid in the water bottles at the moment, making increasingly excited sounds until she finally whirled around, jumping out of a crouch to face him. In two strides she'd crossed their cave/secret laboratory to reach Rivaille.

"I've got it!" She exclaimed. "Gimme some blood."

Rivaille was used to her mild insanity, and knew that her excitement didn't necessarily mean that she'd found the secret to a more permanent time travel, but all the same he felt some flickers of hope in his gut. He looked her dead in the eye with an expression that he knew was intimidating and asked seriously, "What is it?"

"I think I've got it, if we drink from the left bottle, give some blood, and then put it into the middle bottle to treat it, and _then_ we evaporate-"

Rivaille cut her off, not feeling that he needed to know every detail of the process. He probably didn't _want_ to know every little detail of the process. After all, one of those water bottles had been his this morning, and he didn't want to know what he'd been drinking if not water.

"Will it allow us to travel back in time?" He asked her.

She looked at him for a moment, calming down a little as she did. "It will give our memories-our 'souls,' really-to our younger counterparts. We should be able to get in, find our younger counterparts, inject them with our altered blood, and change as much as we want. There's some risk that we'll die horribly, of course, but at least we'll learn more about creating temporal rifts!"

That was...well, probably the best they were going to get, really. They had no time to waste, either.

"Let's find the brat and drink up, then." He ordered her. She shook her head.

"We should start by making one mixture. You're the only one who's drunk the first solution, so we know it's not poisonous, but we have to wait a while after we've drunk it to make the second. Will you be alright with having one less day of memories than Eren and I?"

Rivaille twitched a little at the suggestion that he was being used to test for poison, but he knew Hanji well enough to know she wouldn't risk his life like that.

Wouldn't she?

...She definitely would.

At least he hadn't actually died.

And missing a day of memories...that wouldn't be bad. If they took his blood now, and left tomorrow, he'd just be missing a few hours of sleeping and perhaps some conversation, and if anything happened he could ask the other two about it. It shouldn't be a problem.

"Let's do mine now, then, and then take Eren's and yours tomorrow." He decided concisely. Hanji let out a cackle of unholy glee and proceeded to stab him with rather more force than necessary with the syringe. There were downsides to having scientists that were only mostly sane, too.

She scurried back to her patch of floor and proceeded to do several things, many of which Rivaille suspected weren't part of the actual procedure. At least, he hoped they didn't actually have to dance gleefully over dangerous-looking mixtures. It was unsanitary, if nothing else.

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**There it is! That's my baby, and I'm putting it out into the big, bad world full of flamers and murderers and...why am I doing this, again?**

**Anyway, I really hope you enjoyed the prologue, and I'm sorry it seems so rushed. It just came out that way, though I'm pretty sure next chapter will be better. I'll see you soon! Thanks so much for reading!**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hello and welcome back! For the purposes of this story, Ravioli's name will be Rivaille, Hanji's name is Hanji, and Eren's last name is Jaeger. Hanji is referred to as 'she' because I have yet to see conclusive evidence that she is actually male. These decisions have been made based entirely on an 'I feel like it' way of thinking. Also, thank you to my three precious reviewers!**

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It had been hours and Eren hadn't come back.

He was supposed to come back at sunset, _promptly_, with absolutely no lollygagging involved. They'd had a fight about it just this morning; Eren never came back late after a fight. Rivaille suspected that Eren's last conversation with someone had been an argument, because he had insisted on saying something kind before leaving each morning. So there was no way Eren would be coming home late after a fight. It just didn't happen.

Rivaille could see the moon filtering through the bushes that hid their cave. Eren was far too late.

"I'll go." Hanji's hand appeared on his shoulder, and Rivaille bit back a frustrated growl. He hated, _hated_ that he couldn't go out to fight, and he hated it even more that he couldn't go out to save one of the last known living humans. Eren wouldn't be late if he didn't need help, and it stung that he couldn't offer that help. Not even to the boy he'd kept alive for so long before the Final Betrayal. But he knew he'd only hold Hanji back, no matter how much he wanted to help.

He hoped no one would ever know how much it cost him to nod. He did have a reputation to upkeep, after all.

Upon seeing his consent, Hanji leapt forward into the outside world, for once forgoing her off-task leaps and flips in favor of speed. She'd hurry, he knew. She and Eren were as thick as thieves, and she needed him just as much as Rivaille himself did.

Eren should be coming from the west, as it was much easier to lead titans west to the forest before getting into the trees and transforming back into a human to escape. At least, if he'd listened to Rivaille at all, that's what he would do. And he'd always come back from the west before. There was no way he'd survive a fight if he'd been towards the East without an escape route.

_Please let him be to the west. Please let him make it to the trees._

There was a brush as someone moved through the long grass outside of the cave. Hanji had only just left, and wouldn't come back until she found something. _Titans? Titans or bad news?_

Ragged breathing and slow, clumsy footsteps. A wet cough. But the sun had long set, there shouldn't be titans still moving! Rivaille quietly got into a standing position, leaning on the wall of the cave precariously. If this was where he would die, you could bet he wouldn't die on his knees. If he pricked his ears, he could even hear a noise...

"No. Shut up, Eren, you're not going to die here. Not like this. You're going to get back to the lab, and then you're going to warn them, and then...then...what am I...? No, warn them, and then lead the titans . That's why...you can't die here. Come on!" Eren's voice rang out, sounding irregular and choked. There was another cough, which soon devolved into a coughing fit. Dying? Eren couldn't be dying. No. Not allowed. Besides, he'd sounded like he'd been coming from the East, and he couldn't be too badly injured if he'd escaped his assailants without the benefit of the forest, right? Right. That dying talk was just nonsense.

Rivaille wished he'd taken Hanji upon the offer of a prosthetic leg, but it had simply seemed more important at the time to develop time travel...no matter now. He grabbed a sturdy stick Eren had brought back for just such a purpose and began hobbling over to the cave mouth, and out past that to the field beyond.

Almost immediately, he could see the moonlit field, and the barely-moving form crushing grass as it was dragged through. Wisps of steam came off of Eren's form, but nowhere near as thick as it should be. Hanji had made mention of it before, but had Eren really stretched past his titan's healing power...?

Wasting no time, Rivaille hopped over to the crawling form on the ground, pulling at Eren's shirt desperately. "Come on, brat, stand up. I know you can do it, and if you're just being lazy and making your commanding officer do all the work, I'll never forgive you." He muttered as he tried to pull Eren to his feet. It wasn't proper medical procedure; it wasn't even good, but Eren would thank him when the sun came out and he wasn't in the open being eaten by titans. Besides, Eren's healing factor would fix it if he accidentally broke the brat's neck or something.

Eren seemed coherent enough to understand an order when it was given, even if Rivaille wasn't technically his commanding officer any more. He turned his face up, half-healed from apparently being torn off or something, with marks under his eyes showing that his healing factor was working on _something_ desperately-or at least, under his eyes in the areas where he still had unwounded skin. That made the lack of steam or even real heat even more worrying, if Rivaille had been given to worrying. However, he was not, so he just dragged Eren back to the cave as best he could as Eren made some half-hearted stumbles. Rivaille was barely aware of words coming out of his mouth, insults or orders or swearing or threats or possibly all of the above, but he couldn't have told you later what he was saying. He just knew that he was bringing Eren back to the cave and safety, and then getting Hanji to apply her knowledge of titans to healing him. And he knew that Eren wasn't dying on him. Because Eren was the stupid brat who refused to die. He wouldn't turn that reputation on its head now, not now that he really needed it. Eren, Rivaille, and Hanji had saved each others' lives uncountable times, and it would be ridiculous to consider that Eren was going to die now. It just couldn't happen. No injury could be that severe.

It couldn't, Rivaille told the little corner of his brain that said otherwise. That corner of his brain was a liar anyway.

Finally, they were in the cave, and Rivaille could finally let Eren collapse into the dip in the cave floor that was his bed. Eren groaned and his eyes fluttered, but he hadn't said any coherent words since Rivaille had found him. That was probably a bad sign, but Rivaille couldn't say for sure until he had a chance to see the injuries for himself. With that in mind, he rolled Eren over to his back to check for what, precisely, was wrong.

Eren was a bloody mess.

His shirt was ripped nearly in half vertically, with indents that might have been blunt tooth marks on one side. Scratches and bruises covered his side, and there was a deep gash over the bottom of his ribcage, with some blood-soaked cloth from the shirt still pressed against it. Rivaille could see bone there, as well as some other things that weren't really supposed to be exposed-Eren had been practically torn in half. His left shoulder was at an odd angle-dislocated collarbone, Rivaille thought. That would be easy enough to pop back in, if Eren didn't have any cracked or broken ribs to jostle. Besides the face-being-ripped-off bit, there was a cut on his cheek that was bleeding enough for a wound three times that size, and blood was oozing down from somewhere behind his hair. Eren's pupils were fairly large, but the cave was dark with only a single torch to light it. It didn't necessarily mean a concussion. He'd lost a lot of blood, judging from his complexion, and there was a huge chunk of flesh and fabric taken from his right arm-presumably used to shield more important appendages. The blades Eren normally carried with him were conspicuously absent, and the 3D maneuver gear he used to keep them in place and in emergencies was torn to shreds around him-it was a miracle it hadn't fallen off entirely. As it was, he had only the gas and one fan. The other was a heap of metal with a giant handprint on it.

Eren's clothes were positively soaked in blood. Even if these were truly his only wounds, there was a chance he wouldn't survive the blood loss-it all depended on how long it had taken him to get back, and how much blood he'd lost on the way. In addition, not a single wound had sizzled shut while Rivaille had been taking his cursory examination, which meant either internal wounds or that Eren's healing factor had finally tottered and failed. Rivaille wasn't sure which was worse.

For a brief moment, the ex-corporal paused. He couldn't afford to be distracted in the slightest for this, or let his emotions cloud his judgment. He needed to remain clear-headed and calm. Eren had gotten himself stupidly injured again, and needed Rivaille to patch him up, that was all. He tried desperately to center himself, because Eren _wasn't_ going to die, especially not because Rivaille had let his emotions get the better of him at the critical moment.

Once he was certain that his hands wouldn't dare to shake, Rivaille leaned forward again to test for broken ribs. There were no huge bruises that he could see, but a broken or shattered rib could pierce a lung and spell the end for an unfortunate soldier. As gently as he could, he put his hands on Eren's chest. Pain-dulled eyes glanced at him before sliding off to focus on middle-distance again, and he could tell that Eren wasn't going to be holding on to consciousness much longer.

"Stay _awake_, brat, or I will kill you myself, do you hear?" Rivaille murmured as fiercely as possible. His patient's lips twitched in might have been a smile, but was probably a grimace. It was hard to tell, especially with Eren still bearing marks of his titan form, which always looked to be doing both simultaneously.

Rivaille began to put pressure on his hands, just a little, just enough to feel for any breaks in the ribs, feeling around Eren's lungs and his back. Nothing presented itself to him right off, though the area he could check was rather limited by the gaping wound on Eren's side. Thankfully, the bone he could see under that showed no indication of being broken or at the wrong angle. Satisfied that he could begin patching Eren up without worrying about puncturing lungs, Rivaille locked his eyes with Eren's-miraculously, he hadn't even passed out from the pain of the examination. Eren was better at following orders than he seemed, apparently. Or Rivaille could still strike fear into people half a head taller than him.

"Looks like you managed to avoid breaking your ribs. Where does it hurt?" Might as well check with Eren himself to see if he was missing something.

Eren made another smile-grimace. "Left...leg. Broke it, I think...side wound...tree fell on me. Won't be ab...be able to fight. There are...three of you. Sir."

Rivaille began seriously reconsidering his stance on that head wound-Eren clearly couldn't focus on long sentences, and the increasing lack of relevance to the original question was worrying. Also, he'd expressly forbidden Eren from calling him 'sir' as soon as they'd been stranded outside of the last wall.

This was bad.

He reached down and ripped Eren's left pant leg at the knee, deciding that Eren would be more useful conscious for now than passed out-besides which, if he had a head wound, putting his collarbone back into place would be enough pain to put him out of it, and that would be a terrible idea.

Eren's leg was most definitely shattered. there were two different places where the bone had torn the skin, and the break didn't look to be clean at all. For an ordinary person, healing would take months. At least this explained why Eren hadn't been able to walk or even crawl-his dislocated collarbone would stop his arm from being any use, and even resting his knee on the ground would jostle the shattered bone. The head wound probably didn't help, either.

Without any medical equipment close at hand, he couldn't set the leg-it would be painful, and any more pain might cause Eren to lose whatever weak grasp he had on consciousness.

He couldn't relocate the collar bone, set the leg, clean or put pressure on any of the still-bleeding wounds...

He would have to risk Eren losing consciousness. If he did, Eren had a chance-one in a million, but still a chance, depending on whether the head wound was as bad as it seemed or not-of surviving. If not, Eren was...

"Gonna die?" Eren asked, managing to focus his eyes only a little beyond Rivaille.

No. That was not a question he could afford to answer right now. Neither of them would be able to handle the answer, and Rivaille refused to so much as think it.

It was ridiculous, really. He'd sent thousands of soldiers to die pointlessly, seen horrors and loss of innocence that were unimaginable by most standards. He'd lost people he'd care about. People he'd trusted-even people he'd depended upon. One more death should be nothing to him. The death of one annoying _child_ who had managed to get thrown unfairly into a situation he couldn't control, who Rivaille had just _happened_ to recognize as a kindred spirit, who had _somehow_ survived the Final Betrayal only to get thrown out of humanity's last haven, and who Rivaille had followed into exile because he was an _idiot_. It had been some amount of time before they'd found Hanji, and they'd learned to work together until it was second nature to turn to the other in a crisis, but they hadn't had to bond to work together. He was sure they could have hated each other and still managed to survive, so long as they hated titans more than one another.

And even though they had bonded, they could have drifted apart after the addition of Hanji to their nomadic/refugee lifestyle. They didn't have to add her to the fold until there were simply three people in the world that mattered and countless titans and traitors who didn't. They didn't have to become an inseparable trio, best friends and supporters and comrades all in one. They hadn't had to create a bond unlike anything Rivaille had ever known.

But they had, and now Rivaille was refusing to think about one half of his world disappearing right before his eyes. Eren and Hanji had managed to go from being comrades to his reason for living in such a short time, and they'd insisted on bringing him with them even after the loss of his leg left him nearly useless, and he couldn't handle losing one of them. Not when they were so _close_. Not when they'd finally invented time travel, tested it, and made sure they would be able to fix everything together.

_Shut up, Eren. You're not going to die here. Not like this._

Gritting his teeth, Rivaille decided to deal with the blood loss first, completely ignoring Eren's question. He ripped a long strip off of his shirt, then, finding that insufficient, ripped the entire thing into bandages. One went across the cheek with the cut, since Rivaille could really do very little about the exposed flesh where Eren's skin hadn't grown back from being ripped off. To prevent infection and further bleeding, he bandaged that up, as well, vowing to come back to it later.

Rivaille didn't even know what to do about the chunk taken out of Eren's arm. Would it grow back? Would it not? Either way, it needed bandages, so he wrapped it up and decided to take off the bandages as soon as it showed signs of growing back on its own.

Many thick bandages went around Eren's middle where he'd nearly been torn in half, which had made Eren gasp and begin coughing up blood as he applied them. Why on Earth was he coughing up blood?! Before Rivaille could get an answer, though, Eren had fallen unconscious. Brat. He'd be sure to ask as soon as he woke up, and barring that, get Hanji to investigate.

Carefully, he rotated Eren's shoulder into position and popped the collarbone into place-he'd had to do it to countless soldiers, both after training and in missions. Normally a dislocated collarbone wasn't even a big deal, just something you could fix and keep going. Now Eren jolted in pain even in his sleep, and Rivaille hoped that the idiot hadn't disturbed anything that needed to be kept still.

Now that he'd done his best to stop the bleeding (let that be enough, please let that be enough, if you die I will kill you, you stupid brat), he had to deal with the leg and the head wounds before checking to see if Hanji was coming back yet or not. While Rivaille knew field medicine for those who hadn't been lucky enough to die quickly, she knew titan physiology and what it meant that Eren's healing was going far too slowly. He was barely even warmer than an average human right now, and while the markings below his eyes indicated that his healing factor was doing _something_, nothing was getting fixed.

Rivaille carefully grasped the bone through Eren's flesh, doing his absolute best to pull it back into Eren's skin without tearing muscle. It was a delicate process and he needed to be careful with it, but soon he could use the last of his makeshift bandages to tie his walking stick and a straight piece of scrap metal to the leg, thus completing the worst job of 'splinting' a bone he'd ever seen. A splint wasn't even what Eren needed, but they didn't exactly have anything for a cast, so it would do as long as Eren didn't try to walk before it healed completely.

Yeah, right. The moment Eren consented to do what was best for him was the moment titans turned out to be herbivores.

Still, all that was left was the head wound. It needed to be found, and if necessary, Eren had to be woken up before he slipped into a coma. Sooner would be better than later.

Shifting so that he was balancing precariously on one knee and one hand, Rivaille managed to scoot over to Eren's head without obstructing the light from his single torch.

He encountered a slight problem in that Eren had a _lot_ of hair. The stuff was so thick on his head that Rivaille could hardly see through it to the scalp. Thankfully, he didn't need to. There was a bleeding wound towards the left of Eren's head, right on the top, and his hair was sticking up around it-perhaps he'd tried to feel how bad it was, and the blood had acted as a hair gel to keep his hair our of the wound? It didn't matter now. What mattered that it was a bloody mess, probably caused by something blunt and heavy hitting Eren on the head and glancing off. The concussive force would be reduced if that was the case, but it was plenty deep enough for the damage to be a worry, not to mention even more blood loss.

Here Rivaille's knowledge of medicine ended. He had no idea what to do about a bleeding head wound that needed to be bandaged-putting more pressure on head wounds was a bad idea, but leaving it was an even worse alternative. Finally, he was forced to rip the bottom of Eren's tattered shirt from him and make it into bandages, which he then used to stop the bleeding. It wasn't great, but Eren couldn't be allowed to lose any more blood. With some thought, he decided against waking Eren just yet, hoping that sleep would help his healing factor.

Now all that was left was to find Hanji. Alone. With no walking stick. Without getting too far from Eren lest his condition change.

That wouldn't do. He wouldn't be able to get to Hanji fast enough, and once he did find her, he'd only slow her down. He'd have to take a risk and build a fire, on the off chance that the smoke would attract her attention and bring her back before Eren bled out despite his best efforts.

Thus decided, Rivaille crawled out of the cave that had become their home, picking up a couple of scraps of metal as he went. It was mid-autumn now, and the grass outside would be dry and perfect for burning. He crawled a ways out from the cave, scowling at blood spatters as he went, until he deemed the distance safe. There, Rivaille painstakingly cleared the ground of debris, piling everything flammable in the center of the circle of dirt he was creating. The metal scraps went around the edge of the circle to prevent the fire from spreading, but he didn't have nearly enough.

That meant another agonizingly slow trip to the cave and back for more metal.

Rivaille noticed his knee starting to ache, but he ignored it. This was more important. Besides, going back to the cave allowed him to check on Eren again.

He inched over to his fallen comrade, hoping that he'd see the familiar steam of healing wounds. He was disappointed, though, when Eren remained unconscious and unhealed. If he remembered correctly (and Rivaille _always_ remembered correctly), a person with a head wound should only be allowed to remain unconscious for two hours at a maximum. He'd been preparing for a fire for maybe an hour, and if he added the time healing Eren to that, Eren had probably been unconscious for an hour and a half at the outside. Hanji would find no trace if Eren towards the west if he'd come from the East, but she was unlikely to come home before making sure that Eren was nowhere to be found-five hours, at least, considering how much territory she had to cover. He should probably wake Eren now, and make the fire as soon as possible, before Hanji got too far away.

Carefully, Rivaille shook Eren's good shoulder. Normally this kind of care would be reserved only for cleaning, but Eren was injured badly-kicking him awake would be more damage than he'd be able to handle. Eren made no response.

Well, he'd tried the nice way, anyway.

"EREN JAEGER. Wake up this instant or I will chop you up and feed you to the titans myself!" Rivaille threatened, shaking Eren harder, though still being careful not to jostle any of his wounds. Well, being careful not to jostle them _too_ hard-he'd rather agitate a wound or two than have Eren die because he'd failed to wake him up.

Something he did must have gotten through, since Eren's eyes blinked open and he made a murmuring noise of pain.

"Yeah, it hurts. Tough. You're gonna die if you go back to sleep, so you need to wake up now. Eren. You know I will kill you if you ignore me. Eren! Jaeger, wake up!" Now that the initial panic had worn off, Rivaille felt he could return to normal behavioral patterns. Eren wouldn't be helped by Rivaille acting like the world was ending, and he didn't believe in hiding the extent of someone's wounds to make them feel better. If Eren wanted coddling, he'd have to wait for Hanji to poke at him.

Eren blinked at him slowly, but looked somewhat more alert than last time he'd been awake-that is, he looked alarmingly focused as opposed to feverish. That probably meant he was focusing through the pain, either because Rivaille was threatening to feed him to titans or because he had something to say. It was fifty-fifty, really.

"My transformation reversed-ran out of energy. I only made it back because I put what's left into making new blood. Didn't bleed out as fast. Now I'm out of energy. You guys have to go back _now_, I can't fight any more." Eren's voice was stilted and he held himself in a flinching position, as if speaking hurt-it probably did, with that side wound he had. Besides which, he was spewing nonsense. They weren't leaving without Eren any more than they were leaving without Rivaille-neither could fight anymore, nor move very fast, but the three of them had made it this far together and they would make it the rest of the way in the same fashion. Anything else was unacceptable.

Rivaille scoffed. "Idiot. You're talking like we're gonna let you die. Just drink some of the suspicious liquid and we'll take your blood in a couple of hours, same as Hanji, and we'll _all_ head back in time. Here, drink some now if you're gonna be that paranoid. She slipped into my bottle when we weren't looking." He supported himself on the wall and hopped over to the water bottles full of chemical, grabbing his own. He did have an ulterior motive in making Eren drink it, in that Eren needed to drink _something_ or he wouldn't replenish the blood he'd lost, magic titan healing powers or no. Also, Hanji had dumped all of their water so she'd be able to play with chemicals.

He grabbed the correct water bottle and hobbled over to shove it in Eren's face. He didn't want Eren exerting too much energy, either, since he wasn't nearly out of the danger zone yet, so he tilted Eren's head back and made him drink manually.

At first, Eren clumsily tried to twist away and avoid drinking, but Rivaille solved that problem by pinching his nose shut and forcing him to drink or suffocate. They all hated using their precious supplies of liquids, except Hanji who was mildly insane and therefore didn't count, but he and Eren would have to forego their traditional no-you-drink-it fight for now. Eren wasn't getting out of at least attempting to keep himself alive.

Finally, Rivaille deemed Eren sufficiently hydrated and removed the bottle from his person. Eren's eyes were beginning to glaze over again as he spent the last of his energy, and Rivaille silently decided that the signal fire for Hanji would have to wait until he was certain Eren wouldn't fall asleep again.

Slowly, Eren raised a shaking hand to rest it on Rivaille's shoulder, a gesture that he recognized was supposed to catch his attention.

"Stop. That's your planning face, you're trying to waste your resources keeping me alive. Stop it. I'm not gonna live."

The ex-corporal stiffened. It was very true that Eren was still in danger, and depending on how much blood he'd lost and how well his healing factor was faring, he might have been doomed from the start. Rivaille didn't believe in lying about this to the injured party, and he certainly didn't believe in burying himself in denial. He'd sent hundreds, _thousands_ of soldiers to their deaths, and he'd never flinched from the risk. He'd known every morning that sending Eren out alone was sending him out to risk his life for all of their safety. He knew that he might be sending Eren out to sacrifice his life for them, and he'd thought he'd accepted that. Still...

"No. We will all live for a couple more hours, and then you can die as much as you want. I will use my resources to keep you alive as much as I want, and you're just going to have to deal with that." Eren's hand faltered, and Rivaille reached his own up to keep it on his shoulder. He leaned over until he was leaning into Eren's personal space intimidatingly. "So I don't want to hear one more complaint, _do you understand, soldier?"_

Eren smiled at him weakly, with an air of gentleness that seemed odd on him. "Yes sir. I'm going to live, and I will be happy about it. Sir."

"I want you two...to go back, and fix this. _Fix this_. Stop anyone from ever betraying us...I want you to..." Eren reached up with his free arm and withdrew something from his pocket, pushing it into Rivaille's own spare hand and nearly disbalancing him in the process. "_Fix this._" He insisted one last time. "Good luck." With one last squeeze on his hand and his shoulder, Eren's eyes glazed over and he fell limp.

_No_.

_No_, that was all he could think. _No, this is wrong, not Eren, no, _no.

He fell forward, clutching Eren's hands in his and feeling the hard edges of whatever Eren had given him against his hand. _No. You said you wouldn't die. Wake up, please,_ please!_ Damn it, Jaeger, wake up!_

His hands shifted from Eren's and onto the remains of the torn-up shirt. He felt his shoulders shuddering as he leaned in to Eren's still form. There were hot, wet tears escaping his eyes, but that didn't make _sense_, he never cried over a dead soldier.

_No, not Eren, no._

He didn't know what happened after that.

All he knew was that his eyes were dry when he returned to himself, and he felt a new determination. Screw revenge, and if Eren thought they were leaving him, screw Eren, too.

Mechanically, Rivaille rose and crawled to the nearest pile of scrap. He dragged it out and surrounded his signal fire with it, then went back for the torch. He refused to look at the cooling body near the mouth of the cave, and soon had a huge blaze going. The night was calm and didn't toss the fire about with wind, and within the hour he heard Hanji's return. Good.

"Hey, didja find Eren? Is he okay? Where's your crutch, anyway?" She asked hopefully, bending over and leaning into his personal space with her glasses smudged.

Rivaille said nothing and began to go in the direction of the cave, using her as a support. She must have sensed something was wrong, because her questions got darker as they proceeded. "How bad is it? Come on, talk to me. Do we need to get going quickly? Has Eren come back? What-"

She stopped as soon as they entered the cave, seeing the form huddled against the wall.

"Rivaille, he's not breathing."

Rivaille nodded.

"I'm going to fix that. I can make something to do it, don't try to stop me. I can bring him back, and then we'll _all_ travel back in time together."

For just one second, she teetered on the edge of grief, but they didn't have time for her to go through the same grieving process he had. He was glad she'd come to the correct conclusion on her own, because they would be bringing Eren with them whether she liked it or not. He'd hate to have to force her, but he would do anything to keep his little unit of three together, even if both of them hated him for it. But it seemed she was just as determined as he was.

"We're going to bring him back to life. We're not leaving him here, Hanji, and if you go without him you're going alone." He told her seriously, just to be certain. He'd rather get eaten here with Eren than go back in time, save humanity, and have to face a bright-eyed, child version of Eren who had never lost everything and who was_ not their Eren_. He had a feeling Hanji agreed with him on that.

He was proven right again when she took in a single, shuddering breath and nodded, smiling brightly. "Of course we are! What, you think I'm going to leave my very favorite experiment here to rot? _Obviously_, we're bringing him with us! I'm offended that you thought I'd leave him here."

And the best part was, that was true. Rivaille had fallen to despair for a moment or an hour or who knew how long, but of course they weren't going to just let Eren die. They'd already redefined what was possible once, and they would do so again and again and again until their tiny group of survivors was able to live peacefully, like they'd promised. They would never let Eren just slip away from them and _die_. That had been decided before his heart had stopped beating, and Eren just hadn't known it because he was a stupid brat who needed to get his head screwed on right. Now it was just a matter of time before he and Hanji woke Eren up and yelled at him for hours about responsibility and not dying and other things he should be more careful about.

Rivaille unclenched the fingers on his left hand for the first time since Eren's last words had left his lips. He lifted the bloody key Eren had given him on its broken chain into the the torchlight, smiling at it.

_Wait for us, Eren, because we're not letting you go!_

* * *

**Here's the rest of the prologue/chapter 1! My unhealthy codependent darlings are in denial, it's great. I almost let you think Eren was gonna live and put his death in another chapter, but this one didn't want to end before he died. Oh well. Hope you enjoyed, and thanks again to my lovely reviewers and followers!  
**


	3. Chapter 3

A week later and several years earlier, Rivaille stumbled into existence with a gasp, cradling two precious syringes in his hands.

It had been good that he'd forced Eren to drink that chemical, or they would have had to work for a lot longer to bring him back to life. As it was, his titan genes had combined with his acceptance of his death to preserve his body as long as possible instead of protecting it in its last moments. At least, that was what Hanji said. Personally, Rivaille didn't care about the minutiae as long as Eren survived. He was going to have Words with that boy, and if Eren wasn't terrified of dying after those Words, Rivaille would resign his position in the Scouting Legion.

But that didn't matter right now; what mattered was that Eren's body had been preserved, and thus, his bodily functions had continued after his heart had stopped beating. He'd digested the chemical-at least enough so that they could take his memories and synthesize a drug that would add his consciousness to the mixture. Neither of them had wanted any risk with this, so it had taken them a whole two weeks to make absolutely certain that Eren would be completely resurrected. It had been a tense fortnight, but there had been no question that they were equally determined in this. Hanji had been just as adamant as Rivaille-in fact, she'd hardly slept the whole time, and she'd sedated Rivaille the only time he'd mentioned leaving the safety of the cave to get them more water. He'd been strictly forbidden from dying until they got Eren back.

Hanji was truly a scary, scary lady when she wanted to be.

After they'd finished synthesizing the drug, they'd both taken the chemical for themselves and made their own memory chemicals-it had been a silent agreement that Rivaille would have to have a new dose made, since he refused to forget Eren's last words. It was good that he hadn't had to ask for it, since he wasn't certain how he would have explained in words how much he needed not to forget those precious moments. Even if they weren't _really_ Eren's last words, they were the messages Eren wanted to be certain were delivered before he died, and they were precious. He would keep them until he died.

Which was why he needed to hurry with these syringes. He was carrying his own memories and Hanji's-Hanji was the only one who truly understood the science behind the memory chemical, so she was entrusted with Eren's memories. She would be hiding them in a safe place now, to be brought out once they found out where exactly Eren lived. They'd never thought to ask, a fact that had Rivaille cursing now, but it had never seemed relevant to ask where a destroyed house in the middle of a fallen wall was, not even a house as important as that. After all, they'd thought Eren would be around to show them.

Rivaille's job was to transfer his memories to his younger self before his body faded back into his own time, and then use his younger body to get Hanji's memories into her younger self after she'd hidden Eren's vial in her lab and disappeared. From there they'd have no problem abducting Eren and shoving his memories into him. But for now, Rivaille had the hardest job in the entire operation: catching his younger self by surprise and stabbing him with the syringe with only one leg at his disposal.

His younger self would be as intelligent as he himself was, and what he lacked in experience his ability to run without a crutch would make up for. Rivaille would have to resort to trickery to inject the memories, especially since he was crunched on time. Unfortunately, his younger self would be expecting such trickery the instant he recognized himself, so thinking like himself was a quick ticket to defeat.

Good thing he had the most Eren-ish plan he'd ever heard of.

Using his improvised crutch of scrap metal and broken 3D maneuver scraps, Rivaille eventually managed to get to his old bedroom in Headquarters. Hanji had appeared in Shiganshina, Eren's home district, and hadn't been able to explain in plain English how she could control where they appeared. As far as Rivaille could tell, it was fairly easy to manipulate location once you were arriving somewhere where you didn't exist, and therefore, weren't anywhere.

He really didn't approve of all the stairs he'd had to climb, if Hanji could have put him literally anywhere.

But no matter. He was at his door now, and all that remained was to see if his younger self was home.

_Channel Eren. Know the stupid brat. Be the stupid brat. Don't follow logic or good sense._

Right. He knocked twice and slammed the door open.

Empty. And, of course, not a dust particle to be seen. However, if he knew his schedule at this point right, he should be home from a particularly exhausting mission within minutes, if he hadn't arrived already. That gave him a little time to prepare Plan B.

Rivaille did have to take a moment to revel in the beautiful cleanliness of the room. He hadn't been somewhere so beautiful in a long time...ah, home, sweet home.

Now to booby trap the place.

* * *

Rivaille the younger (though he didn't know yet that he was one of two Rivailles currently in the world) suspected nothing when he opened the door to his room, exhausted. He'd lost more men today than he'd like to count, and all because the damn fools had kept getting themselves eaten. He needed to...

Wait.

This room wasn't empty.

This room had one occupant, and he could see the man sitting in his desk chair.

That was all he could see before the man pulled on something behind the chair and he was promptly flung to the door, which slammed shut a moment before he hit it. Another tug and a loop of rope surrounded his arms and his legs-laughably easy to get out of, but sufficient to distract him for a critical moment when he got out of them. Fortunately, his attacker hadn't yet disarmed him, though Rivaille failed to see how one would do that with booby traps.

"We're gonna make this quick," a familiar voice told him, "because I've got better people to meet."

Rivaille whipped his head up to look into the eyes of...himself?

Immediately, he was suspicious. "Who are you? What do you think you're doing? You know there's no chance-"

He was cut off by the familiar stranger standing up with a crutch, and noticed for the first time that the man only had one leg.

"I don't care what you have to say. I told you, I have people to meet who are infinitely more important than you will ever be. Now, if I don't hurry up, humanity will end and Eren will mock me to the end of time. I, for one, do not want to hear 'You had _one job!_'"

The man met his eyes in exactly the same way Rivaille knew he himself looked at his more unruly subordinates, now close enough to touch him. "You are me, except without the only two things that make life worth living, and set up to take the hardest fall you can survive. I will not allow that to happen to us again. Now shut up and-" the world went black.

* * *

_I just defeated myself. By monologuing._

_Monologuing._

Clearly, Rivaille needed to reevaluate his life choices. Both Rivailles. Any and all Rivailles that existed needed to change that. That was a terrible way to go out, and that vulnerability needed to be covered for.

All the same, it _had_ worked, and he would have to thank Eren for the idea, though the titan probably had no idea just what he'd done to inspire that approach. At least it had been unexpected.

Meeting his younger self had been...he wouldn't want to do it again. But now he just had to wait for the drug to take effect...there we go.

* * *

Rivaille's first thought upon awakening in his younger body was _Ropes. Why the ropes?_

The last he remembered was having his blood taken for his memories, but he must be in the past now. According to the plan, then, he needed to get some sleep and get Hanji back. If she'd successfully hidden Eren's syringe, they'd have a full set soon. Rivaille picked himself out of the ropes binding him, picking up the two syringes from the floor-one full, the other mostly full. The upside of this method of time travel was that they had, for all intents and purposes, immortality as long as they had a body to send their memories into and blood to inject people with. Though when they'd switch bodies, the old body would go into stasis and get sent back to its original timeline as soon as they entered a new body, and they wouldn't want to do it any more than necessary because they'd lose all memories past when the blood had been taken.

Speaking of which, _why the ropes? Why?_ His plan had been to simply walk into his room and directly tell his younger self what was going to happen, as per Eren. Apparently he'd needed to move to Plan B, booby trap the place and then tell his younger self what was going to happen, or even C or D (simply jabbing him with no explanation or talking at him until he was distracted before injecting him, thusly taking him by surprise, respectively), or a combination. Or he'd improvised; improvisation in the field had always been a strong point of his.

Bed time either way; the younger Hanji might suspect something if he showed up at her door just after going to bed. Also, he refused to show up late in Hanji's room after a stressful mission and ask to spend time privately with her. Just...no. They'd both agreed that the missing night for Hanji was perfectly acceptable compared to that.

He couldn't help cleaning up the booby trap materials before going to sleep, though, and no one would begrudge him his first bath in a long time. It was indescribably blissful to finally reacquaint himself with cleanliness after so much time.

* * *

The next morning, Rivaille woke up a five o'clock precisely, just as if he'd never been away from humanity. This was mostly due to the fact that Hanji had made it her personal mission to blow something up at five o'clock ever morning, so none of them even needed alarm clocks. In fact, it was a rule that if you could catch Hanji immediately after one of these explosions, maiming was allowed. It was one of the best rules Rivaille had ever made in his time as the leader of the Scouting Legion.

Ah, there it was-the sound of footsteps as someone chased Hanji past his door. Through the wood, he heard "Wakey wakey eggs and ba-ack! That could hurt someone, you know!" before the footsteps tumbled down the stairs at the end of the hallway.

Well, there would be no catching Hanji alone for the next half hour unless he took extreme action. However, he really did want to get his companions back as soon as he could...dilemmas, dilemmas. Well, desperate times called for desperate measures, Rivaille decided as he grabbed his clothes and 3D maneuver gear, hurrying through his morning ritual until he was fully prepared for a battle.

He hated to do this just as soon as he'd returned to cleanliness and order, but he ruffled his hair and untucked his shirt, inspecting himself critically in the mirror. Scouting uniforms slightly askew, check. Circles under eyes, check. Pissed expression is good to go. He looked like he'd been woken up and was about to leave his room immediately afterward. Mostly true, but now he looked more like Hanji had woken him and was now about to die a painful death because of it.

Not bothering to worry about how it would look when he charged at one of his own soldiers as if she were a titan he was about to eradicate, Rivaille shoved open his door and slammed it shut.

"HANJI ZOE." He shouted threateningly, racing after her footsteps and the footsteps of whatever soldiers were chasing her.

Down a flight of stairs and down a hall, and he could see the door close behind the last soldier just as he arrived. He yanked open the door and ran like titans were after him, taking advantage of the random trees around headquarters to use his 3D maneuver gear. It was no time until he caught up with the cackling, skipping figure of their very own resident scientist.

He dove out of the tree he'd just landed in, tackling her and rolling in one movement until they were both standing-though the fact that Hanji was standing had more to do with her agility than his help-and he had her arm in a firm grip. The first soldier skidded to a stop next to them, soon followed by about four others.

Rivaille pinned them with an unimpressed look. "I'll take it from here. Hanji, come with me." Calmly, he led her back to Headquarters, keeping his head held high.

The first three soldiers he passed would die in the next week. The next would be maimed for life. The last would last almost half a year before getting eaten. None of them would survive the next three years.

He kept going.

Once they got closer to Headquarters, Hanji broke her unusual silence. "What's actually going on here?"

Rivaille smirked. He'd nearly forgotten how perceptive his friend was even now. Of course she knew he wasn't angry about being woken.

Hanji seemed to take his silence as a refusal to acknowledge the question, and persisted. "You're never this upset about a bad mission, and I know you aren't mad at me for getting all of your soldiers up in time for breakfast and training like I do every day. Not only that, you just look depressed. If I didn't know better, I'd think you lost someone you cared about on that mission, but you _do_ know better than to get attached to newbies, right? What happened?"

Rivaille narrowed his eyes. She was nearly _too_ perceptive. To answer her question, he shook his head. "I'll tell you in a moment, this is something much bigger than us. You'll need to know some things in order to help. Let's go to your lab."

She grinned at the mention of her sacred space-for all she spent her time in the field, she did love her lab and she'd grab any chance to show it off. "Sure thing! Titans, then? Or did you meet a _laaady_ friend?" She teased.

"I can still apply corporal punishment. I _am_ your superior, in case you forget." He huffed, and he was not pouting at all.

It was good to be able to talk to a friend without titans being less than a kilometer away. He hadn't realized how little time they'd had to tease one another when they were trying to resurrect Eren.

All too soon, they arrived at Hanji's lab, and she shut the door behind her.

Just to make sure, he asked, "This room is soundproofed, isn't it?"

She was a fighting force in her own right, especially considering this was her home turf. It never hurt to muffle the sounds of a struggle.

She shot him a look, but answered without suspicion, apparently deciding that he was asking to make sure no one else heard what he was about to say rather than to make sure that no one heard her fighting him, if it came to that. "Sure thing, there's only the one room that's not, and that's up the stairs in the explosion chamber. How sensitive is what you're about to tell me?"

Rivaille almost regretted this. Almost. But not really, because as nice as this Hanji was, it wasn't the right Hanji. So he walked over to her under the pretense of checking the strange liquids bubbling on the table-it was flimsy at best as a pretense, but it didn't have to have finesse as long as it worked. He got close enough that their shoulders almost brushed, which was when Hanji began to notice that something was odd, but by that time it was too late. She was fast, but he was faster. The needle was in her arm and partially emptied before she could get away, and just as quickly, he yanked it away, saving it from being removed and shattered.

Immediately, Hanji ripped herself away from him, backing against her lab table with an audible _thunk_.

"Rivaille...? What...why? What did you do to me?" He could hear the betrayal in her voice, and that was what sealed it for him. The Hanji from his time wouldn't believe he'd betrayed her if she saw his sword sticking out of her gut. That difference let him feel no guilt in replacing her with the real Hanji, the one he knew. All the same, he owed her an explanation.

"I'm a time-traveler. You're becoming you again." He explained as quickly as he could, knowing she didn't have much time left.

An odd expression crossed her face before she slumped, unconscious. He stepped forward to catch her before she fell to the ground, reveling briefly in the feeling of standing up on two legs-he hadn't had the time earlier, but now it was wonderful to feel them both. He'd been out a leg for far too long.

Carefully, he lifted Hanji and brought her to the cot that lived in the lab for just such a purpose, laying her down there to sleep. She'd probably wake up soon, but he didn't know how long he'd been out, as he didn't know when he'd arrived in this time. All the same, he'd bought them some time with his 'You woke me up I'm going to murder you' guise, so as long as she woke up fairly soon, all should be well.

Rivaille pulled up a chair and settled in to wait.

* * *

**As always, thanks to my beta, my readers, and my reviewers. Without my beta I would be writing one-legged Rivaille rocking back on his heels-I actually had to try that to see that it wouldn't wok.**

**Also, I try to talk to all of my favoriters/followers, so please tell me if I haven't contacted you! I'm really glad you're reading!**


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